Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures have released a slew of new images, as well as set photos of director Gareth Edwards, cast and crew, from the epic action adventure GODZILLA. The first movie came out 60 years ago and fans can’t wait to see him stomping across cinema screens again.
For Southern California residents battling the heatwave, be on the lookout for the King of the Monsters looming over the streets of Sunset and LaCienega in Los Angeles.
Imagine the arrival of a great creature that mankind can’t even communicate with, much less control…what would that be like to live through?” asks Edwards. “How would the world react? We’ve all seen or experienced incomprehensible disasters, natural or otherwise, that would seem like a scenario from a movie if they didn’t actually happen. So the challenge of making the ultimate Godzilla movie was to reflect that reality, which gets to the heart of what Godzilla is really about.”
Photos – Copyright: © 2014 WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. & LEGENDARY PICTURES PRODUCTIONS LLC. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Before a single frame of GODZILLA had been shot, the director and producers created a 90-second teaser to express the mood they wanted to bring to the film, which they debuted at the annual Comic-Con International before nearly 7,000 screaming fans.
The grainy footage revealed a city reduced to rubble, with the great creature materializing through the smoke and dust, and issuing his deafening roar. Over the imagery, Edwards played the haunting words of Robert Oppenheimer, “father” of the atomic bombs that reduced the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki to radioactive ash, quoting the Hindu scriptures to describe the incomprehensible Pandora’s Box they’d opened: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Godzilla has always had a mystery and duality about him – a being of pure instinct that moves not in concert with humanity, but towering over it as he rises implacably from the sea. “Monsters have always been metaphors for something else,” Edwards notes. “They represent the darker aspects of our nature and our fears of what we can’t control. In a way, Godzilla almost embodies a kind of ‘wrath of God’ – not in a religious sense, but rather nature coming back to punish us for what we have done to the world. In our film, we are definitely tapping into those ideas.”
Guiding the director was a desire to treat GODZILLA as a story first. “It was really important to all of us that the audience cares about what’s going on and why, so I didn’t want it to just be spectacle after spectacle,” he explains. “Instead, the idea was to use some restraint to draw out the tension and suspense and really build up to that moment when we finally reveal Godzilla in all his glory for the first time.”
The director, who honed his visual effects acumen during his early years in British television, relished collaborating with visual effects pioneer Jim Rygiel, who brought Middle-earth to life in “The Lord of the Rings” films. He also got the opportunity to work on some additional visual effects with John Dykstra, whose legend in the industry goes all the back to “Star Wars.”
“Gareth knows how to create 3D monsters on his laptop, which made my job easier and a lot of fun,” says Rygiel. “With other projects I might have thrown up green screen everywhere, but Gareth wanted to shoot entirely against black to better relate to Seamus’ atmospheric cinematography. Visual effects people hate smoke and dust because we have to paint it all out and put it back in, but when you look at the finished shot, you feel the depth and layers, rather than seeing everything clearly in a brightly lit scene.”
The film’s visual effects demands were split among two effects houses, with the London-based Double Negative enhancing environments, and Canada’s Motion Picture Company handling the creature work. The challenge lay in creating seamless, believable interaction among the digital elements and the real world. Rygiel states, “In our film, we have big monster battles, the destruction of cities, a tsunami, intense military operations, and many unusual elements, and each component had to be absolutely based in reality.”
Edwards began conceptualizing the film’s score prior to enlisting Alexandre Desplat to compose it.
“When you work on a film like this, the most inspiring thing to draw on is music,” Edwards says. “The first thing I ever do is create a playlist on my phone with the soundtracks that I’ve loved that I think have the right tone and quality for this film, the haunting emotion of the movie, as well as the sinister horror and darkness that was going to come into play, and Alexandre definitely got a high score.”
Having seen “Monsters,” Desplat appreciated Edwards’ focus on the emotional underpinnings of the characters amid the spectacle, a sensibility that ultimately informed his score for “Godzilla.” “Even though there’s danger, you only share the danger if you empathize with the characters,” the composer states. “With ‘Godzilla,’ what was important to me was emphasizing the great sense of loss surrounding Ford and Joe from the beginning of the film, and that we still feel the trembling of that moment as we follow these broken souls into the present.”
With the great force of Godzilla propelling the action, Desplat also relished the opportunity to make a big sonic impact with the music as he recorded the final score with the Hollywood Studio Orchestra. “I’ve never done a monster movie before, so coming to this with more than a hundred musicians—double brass, double horns—allowed me to open the frame of my imagination to another territory, and that’s very exciting,” Desplat describes.
“Gareth is very sensitive to music and that was fantastic for me. When I played back music for him in my studio, I could see him watching the images and listening at the same time. I tried to always keep the tension high, but the trick was knowing when to release the pressure. For example, a scene of people in the streets can be very mundane. Nothing is happening, but instead of letting the tension slip away, you keep it going. That structure is something I tailored with Gareth as the movie and the score were taking shape, so there’s a great sense of continuity between what you’re seeing and hearing.”
The director marvels, “Alexandre is a bit of a hero of mine musically, and the score he created for this film is just stunning. I’m really excited. I can’t quite believe not only that Alexandre composed the ‘Godzilla’ soundtrack, he’s done my soundtrack. It’s the most amazing gift I think I’ll ever get.”
In Summer 2014, the world’s most revered monster is reborn as Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures unleash the epic action adventure GODZILLA. From visionary new director Gareth Edwards (“Monsters”) comes a powerful story of human courage and reconciliation in the face of titanic forces of nature, when the awe-inspiring Godzilla rises to restore balance as humanity stands defenseless.
Gareth Edwards directs GODZILLA, which stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson (“Kick-Ass”), Oscar® nominee Ken Watanabe (“The Last Samurai,” “Inception”), Elizabeth Olsen (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”), Oscar® winner Juliette Binoche (“The English Patient,” “Cosmopolis”), and Sally Hawkins (“Blue Jasmine”), with Oscar® nominee David Strathairn (“Good Night, and Good Luck.,” “The Bourne Legacy”) and Bryan Cranston (“Argo,” TV’s “Breaking Bad”).
GODZILLA invades theaters on May 16th in 3D, 2D and IMAX® in select theatres.
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